| nettime's_zentral_kommittee on Wed, 7 Aug 2013 20:34:22 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime> Danny O'Brien: On the Thoughts of Chairman Bruce |
< http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2013/08/06/1515/ >
On the Thoughts of Chairman Bruce
So I'm reading [27]the latest missive from Chairman Bruce Sterling
about Snowden and Assange, and even though I have some history with the
guy, I'm clapping along, because he always writes a fine barnstormer.
Then, [28]like Cory, I get pulled up by this bit. He's reeling off a
list of names, from [29]7iber to [30]Bytes For All. I recognise them.
They're a list of activist groups I work with. The names are from [31]a
project I'm working on.
This what he says about those groups, in passing:
Just look at them all, and that's just the A's and B's... Obviously,
a planetary host of actively concerned and politically connected
people. Among this buzzing horde of eager online activists from a
swarm of nations, what did any of them actually do for Snowden?
Nothing.
Before Snowden showed up from a red-eye flight from Hawaii, did they
have the least idea what was actually going on with the hardware of
their beloved Internet? Not a clue. They've been living in a pitiful
dream world where their imaginary rule of law applies to an
electronic frontier--a frontier being, by definition, a place that
never had any laws.
Well, let's go through the Chairman's list alphabetically, and see if
they have any excuse for their lack of aid and woeful ignorance about
the electronic frontier.
First on the list, [32]7iber works in Amman, Jordan. 7iber is so
politically-connected that their own government [33]banned them last
month from Jordan's domestic Internet. I'm not sure reaching out to
them was ever going to nab Snowden a safe harbor in the Middle-East.
Probably the opposite: after all, they were were one of the [34]groups
translating Wikileaks into Arabic back in 2010, which didn't exactly
endear them to the local states.
Next up, [35]Access. Access has a base in the United States, where
aiding Snowden would get you hauled in for questioning on [36]an
espionage charge. I note they've been in such "a pitiful dream world"
about the rule of law they spent a sizeable chunk of the last few years
campaigning (with EFF and CPJ and many others) to [37]get https turned
on for a huge chunk of the Internet, thereby protecting it -- I'm sure
entirely accidentally -- from unlawful NSA taps. You know, the ones
that EFF has been telling people about [38]since 2006.
Similarly,[39] Agentura.ru must be incredibly ignorant about the
surveillance state, given that it's been investigating and
whistleblowing on the Russian and American security service [40]for 13
years. Enough to be detained and questioned several times by Russia's
secret police.
But hey, that's just words on the Internet, right? What we really need
is less of that online guff, and more direction action, right? Like our
next witness, [41]Aktion Freiheit statt Angst, who have been protesting
surveillance in Germany since 2006, when they inspired 15,000 people
onto the streets of Berlin.
Maybe you can explain to them how they can better make the security
state a bigger issue in Germany this year on [42]September 7th, at
Potsdamerplatz. I can't imagine any of those people will be agitating
for better treatment for Bradley Manning or Snowden this year.
Moving on: here's a pic from those NGO types at the [43]Bahrain Center
for Human Rights.
That's the back of [44]Nabeel Rajab. He sort of knows a little about
the surveillance state, because his electronic communications and
phones were monitored after receiving this beating from the Bahraini
government.He's been imprisoned in part for his work on social
networks.
Besides the imprisonment of Rajab, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights
in general also has some idea about the risks of Internet surveillance,
because elevenother twitter users in that country have been jailed
because of anonymous tweets that were tracked by sending them malicious
web addresses. [45]Here's their detailed report. Note that that
particular report ends with an explanation of how you can defeat that
kind of surveillance. You know, apart from that delusional rule of law.
Wrapping up those As and Bs, [46]Bolo Bhi and [47]Bytes for All are
both conducting the most sustained and brilliant work I've seen in
advocacy, fighting against surveillance and censorship in one of the
countries most determinedly targeted by both its own government and the
United States for anti-terrorist action: Pakistan.
The idea that these groups, who are fighting to keep the Internet
defended in their own country, are supposed to drop their grassroots
activism and start, I don't know, hob-nobbing the people they are
actively opposing in their own states to get Snowden a break, or have
any illusions about the rule of law on the Internet right now, betrays
a profound misunderstand about what digital activists actually do these
days.
Online activists these days do policy work, but they do a lot more than
that. They have to do a lot more than that, because these days what we
do in the "electronic civ lib" world is actually defend real people
targetted by this surveillance. It's been like that since around about
2008, when all of this deeply stopped being theoretical. Because it's
around that time that we all started getting friends and colleagues on
government watchlists, or getting thrown in jail as a result of
surveillance or Internet activity.
And it's weird that Bruce doesn't know that things got this weird five
years ago, because ten years ago, he predicted at least part of it.
Here's how another of [48]his barnstormers, this time in 2002, to the
O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
In times of adversity, you learn who your friends are. You guys need
a lot of friends. You need friends in all walks of life. Pretty
soon, you are going to graduate from the status of techie geeks to
official dissidents. This is your fate. People are wasting time on
dissident relics like Noam Chomsky. Professor Chomsky is a pretty
good dissident: he's persistent, he means what he says, and he's
certainly very courageous, but this is the 21st century, and
Stallman is a bigger deal. Lawrence Lessig is a bigger deal.
Y'know, Lawrence, he likes to talk as if all is lost. He thinks we
ought to rise up against Disney like the Serbians attacking
Milosevic. He expects the population to take to the streets. Fuck
the streets. Take to the routers. Take to the warchalk.
Lawrence needs to talk to real dissidents more. He needs to talk to
some East European people. When a crackdown comes, that isn't the
end of the story. That's the start of a dissident's story. And this
isn't about fat-cat crooks in our Congress who are on the take from
the Mouse. This is about global civil society. It's Globalution.
Okay, that's a bit over the top, even for a 2002 O'Reilly audience. But
hey, a classic Sterling coinage! It's "globalution"!
In the end, it wasn't Lessig who got cracked down on by the US
government. Ridiculous idea! No, it was his colleague, Aaron. Here
[49]they are at the time. They were both at [50]that conference. Aaron
left early, and so I think he missed that speech. He [51]blogged about
it though.
Bruce continues:
I like to think I'm one of your friends. That's easy enough to say.
But one of the true delights of the world of free software is that
it's about deeds, not words. It's about words that become deeds when
they're in the box.
So, I remember when the Bradley Manning story broke. Here's [52]Bruce's
words (and deeds) at the time, when the techie geek finally and
horribly graduated to official dissident:
Bradley Manning, was a bored, resentful, lower-echelon guy in a dead
end, who discovered some awesome capacities in his system that his
bosses never knew it had... [People just like Manning] are banal.
Bradley Manning is a young, mildly brainy, unworldly American guy
who probably would have been pretty much okay if he'd been left
alone to skateboard, read comic books and listen to techno music.
__________________________________________________________________
In 1998, I was one of a handful of fresh-faced newly-minted cypherpunk
activists in the UK, trying ineptly to stop the roller-coaster of the
UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (and in particular the bit
that would outlaw strong encryption in the UK) from being passed.
Doing this kind of tech activism outside the United States was, and
frankly still is, a little frustrating. Whenever there was any story
about our corner of the political universe -- digital wiretaps, online
censorship, public key cryptography -- it always seemed to be about
what was happening in the US, and not the rest of the world. Back then,
I felt we needed the US media and policy space to pay attention to our
fight: because we felt, very strongly, it was a global fight.
One day, we saw that Bruce Sterling was [53]coming into town for a book
reading, and we thought: here's our chance. Like good Nineties digital
activists, we'd all read our Hacker Crackdown, and knew he might be a
friend in getting some rip-roaring coverage in the heart of the beast.
After horribly hijacking him from what looked a nice literary meal, we
took him to heroin-chic dive bar in Soho, told him our problems, and
begged him to help.
Forget defending crypto, he said. It's doomed. You're screwed.
No, the really interesting stuff, he said, is in postmodern literary
theory.
Honest to God and ask my friends, it broke my poor dork heart. I
listened to him talk for a few hours about what was research for
[54]"Zeitgeist", and then we went home and fought off the outlawing of
crypto without him, but with a tiny bunch of committed Brits, some of
whom [55]are still working on that [56]fight [57]today.
Fifteen years on, the world sucks, but some parts are a bit better. As
Bruce points out with his As and Bs, I live as part of a far greater
and interlinked world of what he called "global civic society", who,
behind the scenes or in front of the microphones, actually do work
together to defend people like Snowden, build tools for
decentralisation and privacy, and frantically try and work out how to
make them work for everyone.
Some of us work on policy, some of us work in a [58]myriad other ways
to change the world, including whistleblowing. We try to minimize the
number who get beaten up or killed. I don't think any of us live in
much of a dream world any more. Pretty much all of us are more cynical
than you'd believe after seeing what's gone down. And I know, given the
odds, some of it looks pathetic sometimes, but believe me, we can the
hardest critics on each other about that. They'd laugh me out of town
if I ever said "globulution", for instance.
And, as the good Chairman says, you do learn who your friends are.
<...>
References
<...>
27. https://medium.com/geek-empire-1/a1ebd2b4a0e5
28. http://boingboing.net/2013/08/05/how-sterlings-the-ecuadori.html
29. http://www.7iber.com/
30. http://content.bytesforall.pk/
31. https://www.necessaryandproportionate.org/
32. http://www.7iber.com/
33. https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/10questions/jordan-blocks-7ibercom
34. http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=43166
35. https://www.accessnow.org/
36. http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/21/19079389-us-charges-nsa-leaker-snowden-with-espionage?lite
37. https://www.accessnow.org/page/s/protectourprivacy
38. https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline
39. http://agentura.ru/english/
40. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agentura.Ru
41. http://www.aktion-freiheitstattangst.org/
42. http://www.aktion-freiheitstattangst.org/en/articles/3775-20130907-freiheit-statt-angst-demo-in-berlin.htm
43. http://www.bahrainrights.org/
44. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabeel_Rajab
45. http://www.bahrainrights.org/en/node/6275
46. http://bolobhi.org/
47. http://content.bytesforall.pk/
48. http://www.oreillynet.com/network/2002/08/05/sterling.html
49. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lawrence_Lessig_and_Aaron_Swartz.jpg
50. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000434
51. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000466
52. http://www.webstock.org.nz/the-blast-shack/
53. http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=01998-02-20&l=114#l
54. http://www.amazon.com/Zeitgeist-Bruce-Sterling/dp/0553576410
55. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2013/07/04/caspar-bowden-tracing-the-missteps-to-the-prism-revelation/
56. http://www.privacysurgeon.org/blog/
57. https://www.privacyinternational.org/
58. https://noisysquare.com/ethics-and-power-in-the-long-war-eleanor-saitta-dymaxion/
<...>
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